Daniel Menaker likes stories that go “spooling off” in different directions, in unpredictable but necessary ways. His own life—as a red diaper baby, high school teacher, fact checker, editor, and writer—has had its own way of spooling off in different directions, sometimes tragically and sometimes humorously.
Menaker’s first story treated, fictionally, the death of his brother Mike. In a family touch football game one Thanksgiving, Mike came down hard on a pass play and ripped his ligaments. He got surgery, which should have fixed the problem. But weeks later, he contracted a septicemia infection and died. He was 26.
Just like that, the Menaker household was ripped apart. At the time, Menaker was working as a fact checker for The New Yorker. That job offered means of distraction until Menaker finally found the words to confront his family’s tragedy. His first story, “Grief,” appeared in the January 20, 1974 New Yorker.
Fame for humor came when he and Charles McGrath wrote a parody of a book called The Best. Not long after the publication of that parody–titled, naturally “The Worst”–Roger Angell came to Menaker’s desk waving a piece of paper. “Sorry, you’ve got to give the payment back,” said Angell, the magazine’s literary editor. “It’s a New Yorker tradition.” Wait—what? “It’s a rule,” Angell said. “Anyone who gets a fan letter from Groucho Marx for his first humor piece has to give the money back.” The letter is now framed in his country house upstate.
Menaker’s career as a writer and author is enviable. He rose to become fiction editor of The New Yorker. He published novels and collections of stories (Friends and Relations, The Old Left, and The Treatment, which became a movie), a book about conversation (A Good Talk), and a memoir (My Mistake). He rose to become editor in chief at Random House, working with writers like Alice Munro, Salmon Rushdie, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Strout, David Foster Wallace, and Billy Collins. He’s also taught writing at Stony Brook.
He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife Katherine Bouton, an editor and writer.
Charles Euchner: Why did you decide to write? Who were your influences? What early lessons did you learn about writing?
Daniel Menaker: My mother was an editor at Fortune. She was an expert in grammar and rules. She was a classics major at Bryn Mawr. She was exigent about rules without being a pain in the ass about it. I just heard a boy say to another boy, “If you want to ride on the bicycle, get the f— on the handlebars,” and she said, “I wonder what part of speech f— was in that sentence.” I never heard her use that language before. When I referred to the famous jewelry store as Tiffany’s she said “If you say Tiffany’s anymore I will disown you. It’s Tiffany.” That was the background.
After college I became a teacher at the Collegiate School and Friends Seminary. I was staying out of the Vietnam War. I loved teaching and was pretty good at it. I would have kept on teaching except for grading papers. That was so onerous to me. It’s not that they were terrible, but it took an incredible time to do it well.
Then I got a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker. I was around writers and stylists and copy editors and people who cared about language. That begins to get installed in your neurons, practically.
Partly out of the long span of grief about the terrible event in my family, I was a very good fact checker. I needed to concentrate on something. I was very exigent and careful and respectful. I did what I was asked to do. I was taught well—the guy who ran the department was helpful and patient.
William Maxwell [the magazine’s fiction editor] coached me. He made his retirement contingent on me being allowed to be an editor. There were older editors, all in their 70s. People wanted to have some change but there was no reason to fire them. He said, “I’ll go but you have to give Dan Menaker a chance.” That was 1976 and I floundered around and then began to find my footing.
CE: And moving from editing to writing…
DM: The thing that made me decide to write was my brother’s death. I always felt guilty about it. We were close—I was shocked and my family was devastated. But I didn’t decide to write—it decided me.
I continued writing and the psychological pressure and the grief and the mourning eventually gave way to the professional aspect of it. I wrote my first book of stories—it was pretty dreadful, except that one story. I did a two-book deal and I couldn’t write the second book. So I returned the minuscule advance, $2,500. [The editor] told me he had never received a repayment of an advance, without asking for it, so he framed it as an example of good conduct.
I just kept on writing. My first nonfiction essay was about TV news, which came from years of watching TV during a grief-stricken state that lasted for a decade. There were formulae. It was scripted, from the introduction of reporter to the signoff. Lewis Lapham liked it and published it in Harper’s.
CE: The key thing for any story is coherence, not literal truth, right? A piece of fiction doesn’t require that every detail be correct. Like with your novel The Treatment …
DM: I was in analysis for ten years and the analyst I was working with bore a strong resemblance to the character in the book. But if you’re talking about correspondence between real life people and people in the book—the dialogue and events and conversations—close to 80 percent is fictional.
Roger Angell once came in with a story by Susan Minot (“The Accident”). He said, “This story is very troubling.” I asked why. I thought it was really good and sad. He said, “I know this family and it’s based on her mother’s death.” Well, I don’t care about that. Fictional stories and novels have to work as what they are, like a painting. If you try to find out who the subject was and that the artist had an affair and her husband killed himself—none of that matters to the painting.
It’s very interesting to read about writers and painters’ lives. But what do you do with an anonymous poem like “O Western Wind”? Nobody knows who wrote it, but it is so beautiful …
CE: Who were your academic influences?
I was taught aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley at Swarthmore, who taught that every work has to be judged on its own isolated qualities. You can ask a writer about what his or her poem or story is about, but they can be wrong. I have this militant feeling about fiction having more to do with the presentation of sentences than any correspondence with real life.
Headley Reese taught a seminar on Baroque art and modern art. We would go to the museum and he would not talk about Rembrandt’s life. He would say, “What do you see in this painting?” It was a time where there was a great deal of new criticism, focused on the objects themselves. It was in full swing at that time.
CE: What kind of research do you put in?
DM: Almost none. I’ll check if I care about getting some geography right or the years of a presidency; I’ll be a fact checker for myself. I just reviewed Oliver Sacks’s posthumous book. In writing the review, I looked stuff up. At one point I simply couldn’t call to mind the ten famous writers about science and medicine in the last decade or so, so I just Googled “most important books about science and medicine.” There’s a condition, anomia, where you can’t remember names.
I’ve worked with historic fiction writers and they do a lot of research. I tend to stick more closely to my own life. I don’t need to know a lot of historic background.
CE: What about writing a memoir? How do you make sure to get that right?
DM: I relied heavily on memory. No one has pointed out any gross errors. I do have family documents—letters, obituaries. I found out about my father’s membership in the Communist Party [by talking with] an FBI guy who investigated by family. I read the Venona Papers. They mention my family. For the New Yorker stuff, the archives are online. I can check to see the first Alice Munro story I edited.
Memoirs are shaky, in my opinion. They’re not the same as autobiography. They’re much more loosey-goosey.
CE: Now, on to storytelling tactics. The best place to start is with in media res, right?
DM: That’s right—start in the middle, with action. That tendency is an outgrowth of movies. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, suddenly there would be a scene and you would figure out what was happening later.
But that was also true with nineteenth century writers like Charles Dickens. He has a novel where you start with two people on a dingy raft on the Thames looking for a body. You have no idea why there are there. Pride and Prejudice has the same kind of immersion—Mr. and Mrs. Bennett arguing about who’s going to marry their daughters. Other authors do it—Fitzgerald and Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee …
CE: It works well, in media res, but it works better with some authors than others. What’s the difference?
DM: What really works is when an author startles me—and that doesn’t happen very much—in a way that’s not a gimmick, that feels legitimate. Look at what Coetzee is doing in Disgrace. Hilary Mantel—her first novel is very domestic and close to home, about a social worker, but it had that same necessity and it’s startling.
When I was a kid, anything would grab me, because everything is new. I hadn’t had 50 years of editing. You get a little jaded. Or things become overly familiar.
CE: Who provides the greatest surprise?
Alice Munro. She’s an amazingly complex writer who hides her complexity under the most conversational, seemingly casual narration, but oh man, it is complicated, especially from the standpoint of time. She uses time almost as if it was a place. … Little by little, she begins to zero on the psychological and thematic concerns of the story that are not narrative, even though she uses narrative. Often near the end you have a dead-center target of some revelation or something that contradicts or changes something.
All this is in the service of her conviction that she’s writing about the chaos of the human heart. She ends up in the middle of the target and what you find is so basically elemental, so affected by drives and childhood that you don’t know about. But she ends up nowhere. Here’s what happened and why it happened, but it doesn’t make much sense.
CE: So it has a very strong arc. But it’s not a simple or obvious arc.
DM: Exactly. The resolution is an un-resolution. It’s a literary and eloquent and down-to-earth demonstration of chaos that rules most of us.
CE: When you write something, do you plot it out or do you do one page and the next—
DM: When I write, I know pretty much where it’s going. I know the plot and the five or six things that have to happen. It would be surprising if it went off direction. But there are these side streets that you don’t see till you get there.
In my new novel, a sequel to The Treatment, the shrink is 85 and only has a couple old patients. The teacher is now the headmaster and someone on the board wants to fire him. He’s a patient of Dr. Morales. He wants the headmaster to know, but he is precluded from telling.
CE: So you know the basic structure, but you can improvise along the way—
In this new novel, this guy goes to his wife’s funeral at Riverside Chapel. Since she was a very philanthropic and social sort, I decided that I could, with some humor and knowingness, create a list of people who attended the funeral. Some are friends and some have very fancy social names and some have names that are conglomerations. I didn’t plan that. I like lists and list humor; they seem funny to me. Since this guy’s a teacher, maybe some of his students will come. It’s as if you can play with a toy—you didn’t expect to find that toy.
CE: What do you make the state of publishing these days?
DM: It’s fine. Books are selling well. The supposed takeover of ebooks has not happened. They have reached a certain level and they’re useful. And the projections that they would be 80 percent of the market has not worked out. I have a theory that when two-year-olds start with Goodnight Moon, and they’re reading a real book, that feeling is never going away.
There was a time, six or seven years ago, I thought publishing was in serious fiscal trouble. It’ll never be a huge profit center.
Publishing is really gambling. You put down money on a table with a bet. Six out of seven times it doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t earn back the advance. But that seventh time, that other bet…
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